


A Pound of Flesh

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, Less Falling Into Each Other's Arms, More Hate Sex, Series Three Rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 09:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6978559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only the dead have seen the end of war. He'd cut down a thousand Spaniards to wage war against her again; she'd travel a thousand miles to spit in his face for the way he left them. Athos and Milady reunite, and nothing about anything is pretty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Pound of Flesh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bibliolatress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliolatress/gifts).



> Requested was one realistic reunion, desk sex included. Dedicated to everyone who is and ever shall be as butthurt as I am that this was not how it ended, when this ought to have been how it ended. In your hearts and in your loins, let this be how it ended.

Athos’ heart is somewhere in the region of his boots as he drags himself, trailing exhaustion and mud, through the door of the office he’s never honestly brought himself to call his own. There was no point in moving anything around, or in moving anything else in an attempt to make the place less Spartan – as Treville was, so should he be, and so he is naturally inclined. He doesn’t want _things_. Things are clutter, things gather dust. His desk is a hard, smooth line of wood, dispatches ruthlessly stacked and consigned to one corner. He habitually sweeps his hand over it before he leaves, stroking the shining stretch of walnut, straightening edges.

His wife has no place in this room, above it all in her dark green gown, her dark brown head turning as she hears his tread – his traipse – and then the low, winded sound which accompanies the sensation of his heart being squeezed unbearably tightly.

Rustling expensively, she stands.

“You didn’t come,” Anne says coolly, as if continuing a conversation of five minutes past. Athos saw her last with her hair around her face, with her armour in pieces, asking, but she’s evidently hung onto some of Milady’s more useful traits. Dispassion is one of these. “You didn’t come,” she repeats, as if his lack of response is because he isn’t listening. “To the crossroads. I waited.” Such armour as she has on now could survive any bombardment. She has ribbon, and lace, and all the trappings of elegance and distance.

“I went.” There’s a hole in his voice and his words tumble into it. “But you didn’t keep your word.”

“I _waited_.”

“Not long enough.”

“Is six years not long enough?” But her pistol is still at her side in its flowered holster, her stiletto more than likely secreted in her sleeve. He closes the door in order to limit the casualties, not for the sake of privacy. “Or was it seven?”

“Seven.” Athos takes a step toward her. “But it didn’t have to be.” He takes another step, makes another mistake; another inch of territory surrendered, another thread of control snapping with a sound he swears he can hear. “You could’ve trusted me. You could’ve waited a little longer.”

“I could’ve –” There’s no colour left in her lips. Her eyes are hard like flint, like steel, and when he’s close enough, her fist strikes his pauldron with a force he feels the length of his arm, in spite of padding, muscle, flesh, bone. Such armour as he has on now is no use as Anne curls her claws into the leather, carving the curves of forget-me-nots cruelly with her nails. “Do you think,” she hisses, petite enough that she can fit into the space under his chin, that she could tear into his throat with her teeth if she so wished. “That this means _anything_? Do you honestly believe that this has any worth at all _?_ ” Her hand swipes downward in a vicious vertical scratch, but the petals remain, delicately embossed, unforgotten, unforgettable. She hits him again, again, her blows like displaced heartbeats that start his blood boiling instead of pulsing. Even lashing out, the arc of her arm is calculated, and he knows better than anyone she could do so much worse. “The price of trust is not a pretty flower! The price of love is not my heart on your sleeve!”

He catches hold of her wrists, not gently. He is incapable of gentleness, or rationality, or pain. “You exorcised yourself of me that day,” he tells her. “Yet here you are, undoing the finest piece of treachery you ever accomplished, refusing to take responsibility for your own unhappiness. Why are you here?” He shakes her, hates her, aches for her, longs to slap her. She’s the very antidote to his upbringing, Anne de Breuil, Milady de Winter. “Why did you come?” And he does shake her, hard enough that her teeth snap together.

She looks him in the eye, perhaps for the first time. The bitterness in that look would sour milk if it could. “Because you didn’t,” she replies, all gall, all bile, all acid. “And even Judas, if you believe in such things, kissed righteousness goodbye before abandoning it.”

His left hand moves before his right, fastening in her hair – but the other, the other finds the blade she’d never leave behind, no matter how many other facets of herself have fallen away, and it bounces on the floor as she opens her mouth to him. Damn her, he isn’t even aware of any plan to kiss her, not that there ever has been any plan to kiss her. It happens, the tiny beat in her throat and the tiny beat in her lips too close to ignore, and he never realises where and what he is until he’s devouring soft, cracked skin, until she’s making small, shameless noises in the back of her throat, her tongue stroking over his, calling him forth from himself with a kind of alchemy which transcends logic and anger and years of waiting, years of uselessly slamming his body against any friction which would have it, years upon years of dreaming of her and waking up sticky and shamed, and nothing more. Athos forgets when Anne kisses him, when he kisses Anne.

Or he tries to.

It doesn’t stop him from forcing her back against the desk, into a figurative corner where all she can do is bend, bend back to get away from his teeth, from the insistent, measured nipping of her lower lip which gets harder and softer and harder and softer, which brings to mind other places, and through it all she doesn’t bend for anyone. She lifts herself before he can, perching on table edge, parting her legs, welcoming him into the warm mess of layers between. Having so many skirts gives her so much satisfaction – it isn’t easy, she isn’t easy, though she grips him with her knees and tangles the hair on the nape of his neck, seeking somehow to ruin: his image of himself, hers. Let him be as mussed and as messy and as desperate for her as she has been for him, for always, in England, in France, in a cabin tossing on the sea while she tossed uselessly, pinning her hopes on one, two, three fingers, a downpour threatening flapping sails and twisted bedsheets.

She knocks the pile of despatches onto the floor with one skidding elbow. She means to do it.

Was he tired before? Did he care before? Was there ever a time when they were slow about this, leisurely about this, when they stripped each other naked as babes and lay back to watch each other in the caring glow of candlelight? They must have. All Athos can recall is other instances of this, other frantic fumblings through petticoat after petticoat, each hotter than the last, each a little closer to his goal, to the warm mound, to the animal silkiness, to the juice like a peach and the impossibility of finesse. He parts with two fingers, enters with one, and she clamps down on the offering with a quiver that goes to the tips of her toes and leads him to wonder how long it’s been, and if he drags this out – and in, and out, and in – what sort of hold might he have over her by the end. Anne’s eyes are already glassy, already edging, she who’s faithless, she’s who’s done nothing to deserve the fall that’s only inches away. She can wait.

He can’t.

Her hand reaches out, blind, and his wanders down, blind, and their fingers brush and worry and undo the spell together. They stare at one another in a horrible moment of connection, of inevitability, of knowledge that this is what it was and ever shall be, never just a harsh, ardent fuck on the desk of a captain with a name and a reputation to preserve. It never was. It never is. It never can be, but when she grasps him with a moist, greedy little grip which seems worse than it is, which seems intended to make him come in her hand, shame on her wrist, lust on her sleeve – better that than his heart, surely – they both pretend it is. They both pretend it can be purely sensual, the sharp edge of the wood lessened by her heavy silks. They both pretend he can’t see her heart beating, bump-bump-bumping above the edge of her bodice, bump-bump-bumping against his own although they’re nowhere near. She groans, tugs him towards her, almost anguished.

He tilts her head back with his unoccupied hand. Velvet and ice, she feels to him, cheap homespun and fire. “Do you think,” Athos enquires, mockingly, caressingly, honouring the words which were her words. “That this means _anything_?”

And then he kisses her, kisses Anne, almost kindly, once on each cheek and on her brow and on her flickering eyelids, and never for a moment does he stop the crude thrusting of his fingers, the quick beckoning motion that makes her whine.

She’s the image of a cat in heat, arching towards him with the flush of springtime fevering her pale skin. Let him do what he will, this celebrated captain; she has about as much intention of clenching her way to a shuddering, involuntary climax for his entertainment as she does of coming without him.

“Yes,” she breathes, and has the immense satisfaction of feeling him twitch before he pulls his hand back, of enduring emptiness for no time at all before that final step closer, that final push of angry into lonely flesh, and soon there are long, creamy gouges in the floor as the desk shrieks its way backwards, score lines in its gleaming surface from her nails, and nobody hears, and nobody sees, and nobody cares.


End file.
